This study focused on the influence of gender schemas on children's abilities to focus their attention away from or toward stimuli containing the dimension of gender. Children identified as gender schematic and aschematic participated in a nonreversal discrimination learning paradigm in which one relevant dimension was gender-relevant and another…

The effect of stimulus novelty, an attentional variable, on learning set acquisition was investigated. Learning set (LS) acquisition refers to an improvement in performance across a series of problems which have a common basis of solution. The design of this study involved two groups, one in which the positive stimulus on Trial 2 involved the…

This study examines the effects of initial response training and criterion training on the discrimination shift performance of preschool children; results are discussed in terms of differing theoretical orientation. After an initial task involving either criterion training or response training, 109 subjects were presented with either…

This study investigated the effects of two stimulus manipulations (spatial distinctness and number of dimensions) on the performance of 24 kindergartners and 24 fifth graders in (1) tasks requiring distributed attention and (2) tasks requiring selective attention. Results suggest that kindergartners attempt to use one processing mode (distributed…